Every business must manage the various resources that are critical to their business operations. Large enterprises often make significant investments in implementation of platforms and development of business processes related to resource management. These investments are outside the reach of many small to medium enterprise (SMEs) that constitute ninety-nine percent (99%) of enterprises.
A good example of this is the maintenance of equipment. Maintenance is a critical aspect of any business, in any industry, yet in many cases there is little focus on maintenance until there has been a breakdown. Maintenance related downtime can be very costly to a business, sometimes resulting in significant losses every hour that a key machine is down.
Maintenance departments typically rely on unreliable paper-based information systems that often produce inaccurate, outdated, confusing, or non-existent data, which can be lost or destroyed easily. Moreover, it is often challenging to align and manage a maintenance department's priorities (such as maintaining a machine) with a production department's priorities (such as manufacturing goods).
Various computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS's) are known. These systems are designed to digitize data and manage a maintenance department's activities such as work orders, scheduling, reporting, inventory, and personnel. However, the proper use of a CMMS is generally fraught with difficulty due to the complex nature of most CMMS's, their significant cost, and non-intuitive or confusing workflows, which taken together, do not lead to improved efficiencies or productivities of a maintenance department, or to a company's bottom line.
Many prior CMMS's: (a) are difficult to setup, maintain and use, (b) do not facilitate access to required information, and (c) do not enable key functions that are desired by customers such as parts procurement.
The problems identified above lead to lost productivity, increased downtime, reduced efficiencies and low competitiveness.
There is a need for a resource management platform and also more particularly a maintenance management platform that addresses one or more of the mentioned problems.